An otaku is someone who really loves anime/manga, though its a little on the extreme side as it really means someone so obsessed with the anime/manga thats all they do and they worship it (well not literrally, u know what i mean).

roosh wrote:
so it means that japanese doesn't have an actual word for "fan" ?

As mandolin pointed out, there is a classical word for "fan." But in common parlance ファン is what is used.

I'm starting to get a little annoyed at this idea that katakana is somehow not Japanese. I knew a lot of people back in college who refused to use Katakana and used the archaic, completely ununsed forms of katakana words whenever they could. That was perfectly fine until they tried actually using those words in conversation, at which point whoever they are talking to go "huh?" because the word that my friend chose hadn't been used in conversational Japanese for over a few hundred years.

Just because a word is in kanji, doesn't make it any more "correct" or "more Japanese" than a katakana word. Thinking like that will just get you into trouble.

Well, I didn't post it to disagree with faan-san. J-lookup doesn't seem to differentiate between archaic usage and what isn't archaic.

On the other hand, I'm never quite sure what I read from people is actually a japanese word, or something they phonetically spelled in katakana. I am a little wary until I can find some source to say "yes, that's actually a common usage in japan".

mandolin wrote:
Well, I didn't post it to disagree with faan-san. J-lookup doesn't seem to differentiate between archaic usage and what isn't archaic.

On the other hand, I'm never quite sure what I read from people is actually a japanese word, or something they phonetically spelled in katakana. I am a little wary until I can find some source to say "yes, that's actually a common usage in japan".

I guess I've been both sides of the fence on this one. :/

I understand where you were coming from with that. Had I seen that (especially from someone whose name just happened to resemble the word), I would have been skepticle as well. But, I looked the word up in my own [paper] dictionary.

mandolin wrote:
Well, I didn't post it to disagree with faan-san. J-lookup doesn't seem to differentiate between archaic usage and what isn't archaic.

Oh, I know. I wasn't lambasting you at all, rather just the post after yours about real Japanese words.

If you want to know the pain of not knowing whether katakana words are real or not, you need to try spending some time with my wife. She'll often mix in English words into her Japanese sentences and then PURPOSELY says them with a katakana pronounciation just to screw with me. I've started having to call her on it every time.